Lore’s for Easter, Xmas, Halloween, Midsummer Eve, May Day, Lammas Day and the Spring and Autumn Equinox’s.

Easter was originally a Pagan festival, as are all the seasonal celebrations we have today. For thousands of years the pagans held 8 festivals a year to worship Mother Nature in all her glory, and for providing them with the life giving Sun in the changing season’s cycles. As Christianity took over around 2000 years ago the original ways of Paganism were taken and renamed then moulded to suit the various beliefs of the Christians doctrines.

The first change was very important because the Pagans were not willing to give up thousands of years of their way of life to take on beliefs of a new one, especially as they had survived so well doing so in their own way. The Christian belief was in one god, the sole giver of all life, and all creation, and not in lots of gods or goddesses. The Pagans believed in the Sun, Moon, Earth, Air, Fire and Water to be the sole giver of all life and all creation.

So St. Patrick came up with the idea to change the word ‘SUN’ to the spelling and concept to ‘SON’ and it worked. The pagans started to see the dualism in their own individual belief systems. The SUN or SON gave everlasting life, it would move in set time cycles that had to be adhered to, it would die then rise again to bring everlasting life, whether you were a Pagan, a Native American Indian, an Aborigine, Jew, Egyptian or any other creed on the planet well before Christianity took over.

Then the names of the Pagan gods and goddesses were taken by the Christians, and renamed the names of their patron saints.

So we get to Easter, this was the original festival by the Pagans to celebrate the Sun rising back from the dead and bringing new life to all from Mother Nature. The Goddess at this time of year who represented Mother Nature in spring was named Eastoria. She stood for the SUN rising in the east again and bringing restoration to the land on which all life depended and could not continue in any way without it. She represented new life and people would collect anything from nature that symbolised this new gift of life.

The essence of a fertility symbol is an egg, hence Easter eggs still to this day. The other well known emblem of fertility is the rabbit, hence the Easter bunny.

Here are some old traditions from the Pagan ways, see if any of them sound familiar. Find as many eggs as you can, collect them, whisk them, then mix them with some melted lard, some sugar beet, crushed cocoa leaves or dandelion root, and some milk, pour it all into a flat dish, then cook them, then let them get cold and eat them by breaking them into slabs.

Find as many rabbits as possible and feast on them all, it would have been a long cold winter without much fresh meat to eat, they would be plentiful in the spring time along with lambs and ducks.

Make lots of bread buns filled with fruits left over from the winter stores, bake them in the oven then butter them when cooked, then pour fresh cream over the top of each bun in the sign of a cross to represent the movement of the 4 main sun cycles throughout the year, summer and winter solstices, and the 2 equinoxes.